Each of these companies sets employee wages (at annual performance review time) by referring to a survey of all the other companies' wages. Their target is, strangely enough, the "average" wage. This is itself a kind of collusion to keep wages down, by pointing the finger at each other. Sorry! Can't pay you more than everyone else gets paid. But on the other hand, it makes economic sense. Everyone gets a fair wage, which for a software engineer is far more than you'd be making assembling cars, and companies don't in general pay more than they have to. The wild card, of course, is options. Pick the right rocket, and all of these little issues about salary won't matter so much.

while reminders to follow the accounts of people who have long since passed away continue to arrive

A follow reminder from a dead Twitter user would be just plain creepy.

Risk averse is not the way to go. As they say, change is inevitable. I'm *cough* well over 40, and I jumped from a "safe" big company to a startup 6 months ago. A few months after I jumped, there was a reorg and my old project was exported. Yes, I saw it coming. It's happened 3 other times to me.

It's quite simple: big companies (including Google) operate according to profitability, and when that inevitably goes down, the saw comes out. When your project gets cut, or shipped overseas, it's a game of musical chairs. If you think you're completely "safe", and avoid taking risks to remain "safe", then one day you might find yourself without a chair.

The best defense is learning new skills all the time, and taking risks. Yeah, it might take some work. Get used to that. Oh yeah, and I turned down a position with Google.

Do not take this personally. You are someone doing a job. Yes, you think you should be paid fairly for that work, but the company will willingly pay you far less than you are worth, if you are willing. There are two ways to fix this: walk, or negotiate. Negotiating may end up forcing you out -- a lot depends on your attitude, and what are the actual intentions of the company. So if you have any interest in keeping the current job, make a plan B, which is figure out where you would go if the negotiation fails. Futhermore, interviewing elsewhere will let you know what you are actually worth on the open market. And who knows, you may find a job you like far better. Do not threaten. It's business. Also, you say: "With budget cuts and layoffs..." Um, your company may be imploding. Why do you want to stay there? Look around. Believe me, you do not want to stick to a ship that is sinking. I've been there and it is not pretty.

And the alternative you proffer is... nothing.

Benchmark on html5 vs flash video? Right here. Conclusion? "... Flash is efficient on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration and less efficient where it can't."

Not that this is an excuse for BP, but apparently we were already managing to do that before the spill... http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/

Right at the end of that motherjones article is the clue as to why BP isn't containing the oil: "They take these bags to a plant and separate out the sand so they can process the oil" Oh, this saves them the effort of pumping the oil into a tanker and shipping it. You see they just hire some cheap labor to scrape it off the beach and then send it to the refinery. Much easier!

It isn't necessary to totally replace oil. Reducing consumption is the first step. US fuel economy requirements are really low, and several high efficiency cars available in Europe aren't on sale in the US yet. The last Humvee just rolled off the line, yay. I bought a hybrid this year and I'm very interested in electric or plugin cars. If everyone on this list would cut their gasoline use by 25-50% or more, that'd save about a billion gallons of gas per year. That's 50 million barrels of oil. That's bigger than... uh, I wish I could say it was bigger than the gulf oil spill. Damn.

... just listen to some Britney Spears?

> Just about everything right now is being sent to them in PDF or DOC format. What do you think the odds are of being able to access these documents in 25 years' time?

Since even Google Docs can import these formats, they must not be as closed and impenetrable as you seem to think they are. Not saying it wouldn't be easier if the formats were completely "open", but ... ok let's pretend MSFT and ADBE go out of business tomorrow. Nobody'll be able to read those documents? I don't think so.

I'm not defending closed formats here. But I have text documents bitrotting on tapes whose hardware readers have very much expired.

Flash is a problem because it is a vendor standard that doesn't need to compete to survive.

Um, no

It fails to take advantage of hardware acceleration when EVERY OTHER SOLUTION does.

Um, no.

Why am I defending Adobe? Actually, I'm not. I'm fighting laziness.

There's nothing closed and proprietary about the format. There already are open source groups rewriting it.

Adobe is doing significant rewrites. Take a look at the upcoming 10.1 release. Under the hood, it's a huge set of changes.

It is in Adobe's economic interest to do so as they have a huge investment in the technology. They have competition in the form of Silverlight, HTML5, etc, and said open source.

One of those Javascript engines you speak of was contributed to open source by Adobe.

As politicians like to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion, just not their own facts.

... and has incredibly sucky UI to boot.